THE MODERN PEPYS

In place of the squalor that stretches

Unchanged o'er the realist's page.
The sunshine that glows in your Sketches

Is potent our griefs to assuage;
And when, on your mettlesome charger,

Full tilt against reason you go.
Your Lunacy's finer and larger

Than any I know.

The faults of ephemeral fiction,

Exotic, erotic or smart,
The vice of delirious diction.

The latest excesses of Art—
You flay in felicitous fashion.

With dexterous choice of your tools,
A scourge for unsavoury passion,

A hammer for fools.

And yet, though so freakish and dashing,

You are not the slave of your fun,
For there's nobody better at lashing

The crimes and the cant of the Hun.
Anyhow, I'd be proud as a peacock

To have it inscribed on my tomb:
"He followed the footsteps of Leacock

In banishing gloom." *

It would be a rough and ready but a fairly sound mode
of classification to divide humorous books into books
that make you laugh and books that make you smile.
Obviously Leacock's books belong to the former cate-
gory. So also, I think, but perhaps a little less decisively,
does the Diary of the Great Warr^ a prodigiously skilful
pastiche of Pepys's Diary in which not only the language
and mode of expression, but the mental—and moral—

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